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Burnt cars and bold words

In the wider world of Bermondsey a gas explosion causes local and commuter chaos. Police tape carves up the near vicinity like the uneven portions of a strangely nonchalant pie. People are kept within and beyond these plastic plod-manned borders and some are handling it better than others. An elderly woman barks proudly about ignoring the pleas of the professionals and staying put with her dogs despite being within the potential line of blast trajectory. It seems that in the event of prolonged evacuation they wouldn’t let the hairy hounds bed down with her and the rest of the temporarily homeless in the community centre. She promises to remain fully clothed throughout the night…just in case.

Inside Muscle HQ three heads tinker around the table in the newly finished site office and one paints large black letters on a nearby wall: ‘BURNT OUT WHITE CAR’, it says. The atmosphere, as with each visit, is markedly different – this time charged with a sense of dislocation and the need to forge ahead regardless. The utopian society of yesterday (or the day before) has fractured a little to reveal the deeper concerns that were always going to be a part of this project. The Muscles are knee-deep the politics of making, authorship and their own very different expectations.

During the process of making their shed for invention (and means of managing themselves within the gallery site on their own terms) every Muscle had a predefined role. Now that the structure is complete they have a place within which to make, should they wish, but the task of what and how is less simple. This is tricky stuff. In one sense, the nature of putting on an exhibition dictates that something should be made to represent the process of negotiation this undoubtedly is. On the other hand, every move they make together as the four-headed artist could be termed art as much as any physical manifestation produced. The office crystallises the sense of unified hope which propelled this project out of the starting blocks, but now that they have moved into another (potentially more interesting phase) it’s roughly hewn but ‘finished’ sensibility feels like a pressure to replicate the power of Muscle elsewhere in the gallery’s largely empty spaces.

The four seem fairly unanimous that no individual should get too precious about anything they personally create and that qualitative judgement is somewhat unhelpful to the cause. For this reason, perhaps, hybrid Muscle drawings are emerging (the Cafe Gallery’s guidelines for exhibitors have been architecturally doctored to great effect) but where do you draw the line between collaboration and defacement? What constitutes a response, and how can the other Muscles 'respond' to the new media projects in production (a computer animation and film), or a bold text statement (that seems part protest, part visual diary of a recent event) daubed onto the wall? How would they negotiate the territory of radical comment within such a close and unnatural context? How will we as viewers relate to the space and the things the four choose to present to us as their parting shot? Are the final work(s) of real significance or is it only through the tangible, visible processes of making that we can understand the journey they have been through?